A new ACLU report claims the IRS has been accessing emails without a
warrant. According to Keith Wagstaff, you might want to reconsider that
email to your accountant with the subject line "Hey, thanks for helping
me commit tax fraud!" According to the ACLU, the IRS could be reading
your emails — even if they don't have a warrant.

The ACLU studied
documents released by the Freedom of Information Act and found that,
despite the Fourth Amendment's prohibitions against unreasonable
searches and seizures, it has been IRS policy "to read people's email
without getting a warrant."

Doing so wasn't always illegal
because of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which says
that email that has been stored on a provider's server for more than 180
days can be accessed without a warrant. But that should have changed in
2010 when, after hearing United States v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit
Court of Appeals found that "the government must obtain a probable cause
warrant before compelling email providers to turn over messages."

The
vital question is whether the IRS continued reading private emails
without a warrant after that case was decided. The ACLU's report says
that the IRS still tells its employees "that no warrant is required for
emails that are stored by an ISP for more than 180 days."

So, is it time to start conducting all of your business via carrier pigeon?

Not
if you use certain email services. Ryan Gallagher at Slate writes that
"not all providers will play along if the IRS is still attempting to
obtain emails without a warrant," noting that earlier this year "Google
said that it is effectively ignoring the 180-days ECPA loophole by
always requiring a search warrant from authorities seeking to obtain
user content stored using its Gmail, Google Drive, or other services."
Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook all told The Hill they adopted similar
policies after 2010.

Still, that leaves a lot of people
unprotected. CNET's Declan McCullagh points out that the ECPA "was
adopted in the era of telephone modems, BBSs, and UUCP links, long
before gigabytes of e-mail stored in the cloud was ever envisioned."
That's why corporate America wants Washington to change the policy:

A
phalanx of companies, including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, eBay, Google,
Intel, Microsoft, and Twitter, as well as liberal, conservative, and
libertarian advocacy groups, have asked Congress to update the 1986
Electronic Communications Privacy Act to make it clear that law
enforcement needs warrants to access private communications and the
locations of mobile devices. [CNET]

Until the law is changed, you
will just have to, in the words of ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed
Wessler, "hope you never end up on the wrong end of an IRS criminal tax
investigation." Good luck with that.